Operating on a Sweat Equity Plan

Pasadena’s Knightsbridge Theatre has seen the light. Literally. With the help of its founder’s credit cards, a third mortgage on his house and actors in the role of renovators, the company is adding an aboveground theater to its current subterranean digs.

“For a 99-seat theater, you couldn’t get much better,” Knightsbridge founder Joseph Stachura, 36, says of the new space on Riverside Drive in Silver Lake that formerly housed the Colony Studio Theatre.

Indeed, the 99-seat Pasadena basement space is cramped with low ceilings. Sometimes there’s noise from skateboarders on the street. And the stage is only 6 inches high.

The L.A. space is a full-fledged theater.

Knightsbridge will continue an active schedule in Pasadena, however. When the Los Angeles theater opens Thursday, the company will have five plays in production, three in Pasadena and two in L.A.

Stachura says the company has three years left on the Pasadena lease, and if the landlord is willing to renew, then Knightsbridge will keep the space. “It’s a good experimental space,” he says.

It was something of a coup for Knightsbridge to get the Riverside Drive theater.

“We reviewed seven different theater companies,” says Mark Fuller, who with his wife, Kathryn, has owned the playhouse since 1965. “Knightsbridge filled most of the bill.”

Knightsbridge has the space in a joint residency agreement with the Fullers’ Studio Theatre Playhouse, which is largely dormant. The Fullers had a similar relationship with the building’s previous tenant, the Colony, which has moved to the new Burbank Center Stage.

“In a sense we are taking a chance--they’re a young company,” Fuller says. “But they have most of the ingredients for a successful run.”

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Although Stachura is quick to point the spotlight away from himself and toward his company of about 50 members, it’s clear he’s the driving force behind Knightsbridge. After all, it’s his credit cards and heavily mortgaged Mount Washington home that are providing the funding for this expansion.

“I’m an actor who got frustrated and opened his own place,” Stachura says. Dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Stachura is starting to show the toll of the 18-hour days he’s been putting into the new space.

“It’s the company that makes it work,” Stachura says. “They’re here not because they’re going to pack the house. They’re people who love what they do: Actors who love acting. I guess we’re the nerds of the theater world.”

All of the company members have come in at one time or another to help with the renovations, says Peter Finlayson, 49, who has been part of the Knightsbridge company for three years and is an actor and director. “I’ve been very pleased at the turnout,” he says. “The enthusiasm is infectious.”

“For me, it’s very much a family,” says company member Paul Duff, 32, who also acts and directs. “It’s like a family with all the wonderful things and all the difficult things.”

Duff, who has been with the company for five years and is another volunteer renovator, says that while there are disagreements, everyone’s opinion matters.

“I think we function in a pretty unique way,” Duff says. “We put in more work and we work together better than a lot of companies.”

Although Stachura makes the final choices of which productions will be done, he says the company does discuss everyone’s ideas.

“I choose based on the passion the director has for the project,” Stachura says. “Then the production is 10 times better.”

The opening productions have been picked, but the renovations are getting down to the wire. Opening in August will be “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and an American Sign Language version of “Godspell.” In Pasadena, “Othello” is on the playbill, along with “Lysistrata” by Aristophanes and “The Fantasticks.”

Stachura says 50% to 60% of the company’s productions are Shakespeare.

“I’m a Shakespeare freak,” he says. “I always have been.

“Consistently, Shakespeare draws better than the modern stuff,” he continues. “And we’ve done so much we’ve become extremely good at it.”

Knightsbridge keeps three plays in rotation at the Pasadena theater. Stachura says the goal was to do one classical, one contemporary and one original play.

But “we haven’t gotten a lot of excellent scripts,” he says. “It seems like a lot of the stuff we get are like movie treatments. I wish we could find great scripts.”

The most original story for Knightsbridge, however, may be about the road that led Stachura to lead a theater company. It starts at being the only child of a single mother in the 1960s.

“My mother was a hippie,” he says. His father left when he found out she was pregnant.

Stachura’s mother, Sylvia, demurs at the hippie label, though. “I don’t think it’s quite true,” she says. “But I was in San Francisco for much of my pregnancy.”

Stachura and his mother lived in South-Central Los Angeles on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. “I was the only white kid in school,” he says. “I got beat up a lot.”

Being alone and an only child, Stachura says he was forced to develop a vivid imagination, a quality that doesn’t hurt in the theater business.

His love affair with theater started when his mother took him and some kids from the neighborhood to see a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Greek Theatre. “It was amazing,” he says. “I was flabbergasted by it.”

When he was 13, the family moved to various cities in the South Bay. Stachura took a high school equivalency test at 16 and dropped out of school. He then started working in small theaters.

For his 21st birthday, his mother gave him a ticket to Europe. There, he met the woman who would become his wife, and they backpacked around Europe, Asia and Australia. Though he had no formal theater training, Stachura supported himself with stage, film and television work along with many odd jobs--from cleaning septic tanks to being a “brickie’s mate,” someone who mixes and carries cement to bricklayers.

Afterward, Stachura and his wife, Barbara, came to Southern California. Stachura formed a Shakespeare company called the Blackfriars and later started the first Knightsbridge Theatre Company.

But creating a theater company took its toll. After about a year, the couple divorced.

“It was my fault,” Stachura says, “because of the time I had to spend at the theater. The theater got in the way.”

Stachura disbanded the company after the divorce. “There were just too many painful memories,” he says now. Some members of the company went on to the Pasadena Shakespeare Company. About a year and a half later, Stachura relaunched Knightsbridge.

There’s still a second Stachura at Knightsbridge. Sylvia Stachura has become a company member by default because of the amount of work she does for it.

On a recent Friday she was busy helping with renovations on the L.A. space. “This is really exciting,” she said, wire scrub brush in hand. “This one has a stage--a raised stage.”

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For a company that’s long operated a single theater on a shoestring budget, the thought of adding a second venue may seem daunting.

But Stachura sees an opportunity in doubling the number of seats. “Subscription sales keep us going,” he says. Once the new space opens, the subscriptions will be good at either theater. At the Pasadena space, located in Old Pasadena near an antiques mini-mall, they even get walk-in traffic.

Knightsbridge isn’t big on grants, although it held its first fund-raiser on July 21. “We’ve gotten less than $7,000 in seven years,” Stachura says.

The July 21 event, which he says cleared $24,000, was aimed at raising money for the new venue and for the theater’s youth program, which takes Stachura back to his South-Central roots.

In addition to free tickets for groups such as Children of the Night, which helps homeless youth, Knightsbridge has an outreach program for schools in places such as South-Central.

“We don’t perform scenes,” Stachura says. “These kids haven’t even heard of theater.

“We go into class and talk about the scenarios of the shows,” he adds. Take “Hamlet,” for example. Here’s this guy whose mother is hanging with the man he thinks may have killed his father, Stachura says. He’s unhappy and confused.

When you offer up Shakespeare that way, “that sucks the kids right in,” he says. “Then we can go on and talk about the dialogue.”

And maybe inspire another isolated 13-year-old.

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“GODSPELL,” Knightsbridge Theatre Los Angeles, 1944 Riverside Drive. Dates: Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 24. Price: $18. Phone: (626) 440-0821.